


a woman is a carving, a woman is a knife

by arbitrarily



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, F/M, Face Slapping, Post-Film, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 06:25:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4993699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You saw things you shouldn't have seen.</i> Kate keeps her eyes open. Ten months later: she accepts another job offer from Matt.</p>
<p>She doesn’t like what she sees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a woman is a carving, a woman is a knife

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Simone Muench's poem "[Spectacle: Possession](http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/3142591.html?style=mine)."

 

 

 

 

 

"The body is a place of violence."  
JEANNINE HALL GAILEY

 

 

 

 

 

  

The car crashes. 

Her head slams first into the dashboard and then asphalt. The passenger side window shatters as the car flips; her seatbelt bites blue and bruising into her collarbone and her mouth fills with blood as her head meets the road.

Her hand sweats but Kate doesn’t lose her grip on her service weapon. There’s ringing in her ears, it makes the blare of a car alarm fuzzy. She thinks she hears Reggie, her name. She winces, her shoulder scraped raw with road rash, but she still has her gun. Her free hand crunches down on pebbles of broken glass from the blown-out car windows as she tries to rise to her feet. Late afternoon Phoenix heat boils off the freeway. That, coupled with the double hit to the head, leaves her vision hazy, surreal. She squints, shakes her head. The ringing in her ears won’t stop. Jesus, what is she doing here?

Just as she makes it to her feet, the car ahead explodes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Hey there, stranger.”

The car crashed and three days later the wrong man comes to see her. 

“Would you look at you. Rough night? Lemme guess: I should see the other guy.” Kate doesn’t say anything, her mouth held grim and shut. Matt’s grin stretches.  

Outside the Phoenix office, Matt’s seated on a bench. He has an empty coffee cup held in both hands between his legs, spread wide. He’s wearing a baseball cap, brim pulled down, a low profile if she’s ever seen one.

It’s been ten months since he recruited her, ten months since she last saw him. She can’t say she’s missed him.

The oddest thing about everything that happened over the course of those three days is that life went on after. Jennings made her take a couple days off, but she was back with her team, working same as before. Kidnap response, Reggie at her side, half-price drinks at The Rusty Horn on Thursday nights. She had thought about moving the first couple months after; decided she didn’t want to give Alejandro the satisfaction. So she stayed. So the only thing that changed was her.

Matt offers her a quick once-over as she approaches, no sympathy to be found in his gaze – cool and assessing but there’s a glint of something all too human there – as she takes a seat beside him on the bench.

He says something, but the words don’t reach her. 

She has to incline her head towards him to hear him. “What?” she says. She’s been on desk duty the last three days, since the shit that went down on the freeway. He knows this. There is no way he doesn’t know each and every thing she has been up to since the last time they saw each other.

“I said, you’re keeping busy.”

Kate snorts. She can’t hear out of her left ear, her vision’s still fucked in her left eye. She’s off balance. The doctor said it was temporary, that this is what happens when your head and your body are too close to a live explosion. She had wanted to ask him what other kind of explosions he knows of other than _live_ , but what was the point. She listened with one ear as he told her about vertigo and about the tympanic membrane, that all of this was temporary, that most things, if you can endure them, have an end. Very few things in life are infinite, he had said. She wanted to know what those things were, but that was another thing she did not ask him. Instead he said: the body heals itself. There was no reason to doubt hers would do the same. So Kate tried to focus her vision, tried to ignore the effort it took to do this, and she sat at a desk, tried to ignore the effort it took to do that too, to do any of this. To be a body that endures.

Jesus. Ten months. She should’ve made Alejandro fucking shoot her.

“Sure,” she says, flat, offering nothing of herself in return.

Silence lapses. It’s too hot to be sitting out here. She can feel sweat begin to dot along her spine.

“In lieu of your curiosity getting the better of you – which, I’m disappointed, by the way; don’t think I didn’t imagine you asking me, _what can I do for you, Matt_ , the entire ride up – I’ll tell you what I’m doing here.” Kate doesn’t say anything but he waits all the same. 

“I got another job for you,” he finally says. “Think you might be a good fit.”

Kate scoffs at that. He lets silence reenter the space between them, patient the same way a hunter waits for a trap to spring.

“You heard what happened on the I-10? I’m sure you did,” she says. “Reggie, you remember Reggie, or maybe you don’t, but we were in pursuit and, it, it doesn’t matter. Ended in a seven car pile-up before the truck we were chasing blew up. I keep asking myself,” she pauses, trails off. She jerks her head towards him, wants him to look at her. The damage is there. “You think what we did was worth it? Because where I’m sitting, nothing’s changed.”

“Shit’s changing all the time, man.” When she says nothing, he says, “Jesus. Christ. Give me a break, Kate. I’m not a fucking miracle worker.” She turns her head slightly, takes in the view of the parking lot, flat land that extends into nothing. She can’t hear him as well with her head turned like this, but she thinks he says something like, it takes time for the real effects to show themselves. It takes time to rework an entire system. She turns her heads towards him again. “These things don’t happen overnight,” he is saying. “You think Fausto Alarcon was the lone big jefe cartel runner in Mexico? In fucking Juarez? You think the work ends there? Rattle the cage, and they all get stupid with fear. The key is to never give them time to rest. Regroup. To learn.”

“You don’t need me,” she tells him.

“Nah, you’re right. I don’t. But I like you.” The way he says it, she almost believes him. But this is what she knows: there is something cold and hard inside of her and it has been there since she met him. 

“You used me,” she hears herself say. She is still watching the cars in the lot, the way the glare from the sun is blinding off the windshields. “You fucked me.” She snarls it, whips her head to face him full-on. He offers her a glance, raises his chin, his face unreadable. “You fucked me,” she repeats.

“I’m not sure what it is you expect me to say to that,” he says after a beat.

“Apologize,” but she says it like it’s something that she’s already lost.

Matt leans back on the bench. He shrugs, crosses his arms over his chest. Like it doesn’t matter, like he knows she will accept his offer. He’s right; she does. She will.

“Apologies,” he says, light and without consequence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her ears are ringing again. In a small motel room outside of El Paso that stinks of stale cigarettes and lysol, Kate stumbles into the bathroom.

Her hands are clumsy, they shake, sticky with blood – her’s, another’s. The doorframe is warped from the heat and the door won’t shut all the way. She turns the faucet on, fills her hands with water and splashes her face, lets it drip down the neck of her shirt. Her hands burn under the water, the skin split over the knuckles, a shallow open cut from the blade of a knife across her palm. She tries to steady her breathing. She tries, she says, “Relax,” out loud, but it doesn’t do anything. Not even when she says it again and again after that. Not even when she changes the refrain to _fuck_ , muttered repeatedly under her breath. She glances up; her battered reflection in the mirror mocks her, dark bruises blooming on her neck already, blood at the corner of her mouth.  

“Fucking relax.”

She has been working for Matt for six months. 

On the other side of the bathroom door, still ajar, she can hear him on the phone. She listens without hearing what he is saying. She can’t imagine what he’s saying. Maybe he’s coordinating with the team, maybe he’s simply saying, “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” She’s never seen him try to bargain and it’s something she thinks she’d like to witness. 

The ride back over the border had been interminable, Kate alone with Matt as he drove, tense as she’d ever seen him. Her hands shook, they’re still shaking, his own, knuckles scraped raw, gripping the wheel. “What the fuck was that?” she’d asked him. “What was that?” but he hadn’t said anything, he drove.

Kate rolls her shoulder experimentally and regrets it immediately. There’s glass still embedded in her back, clustered along her right shoulder blade, her shirt tacky and stiff with dried blood and sweat.

The bathroom door swings open, Matt in the doorway. 

“We’re gonna lay low here at the Ritz for the night.” He steps into the small tiled bathroom, rust lining the faucet, stink heavy with mildew and air freshener. Kate watches him in the mirror, her back to him. She watches him shut the door behind him. 

“I’m fine,” she says. Her voice has that overused strain to it, throat aching with the effort.

“Sure you are.” She glances at him over shoulder. “Gotta get you cleaned up though, take a look at that shoulder.” 

Kate scowls. “I’m fine,” she says again but she’s unfastening her vest. 

She hisses, twists to look at the back of her shoulder in the mirror. Broken glass tinkles as it falls from her vest onto the floor. She bites the inside of her cheek as she pulls the shirt off that side of her body only – the shirt gathered up at her neck, her good arm still in the sleeve.

Without a word, she braces her hands against the lip of the sink, the water still running. He’s quick with his hands, efficient, practiced and easy as he cleans the wound. There’s a story there, she thinks. She wonders how many bodies he’s stopped to repair after he ripped them apart. She sucks in a hard breath when he starts to pick the glass and debris out of her skin, and she squirms away from him.

“Don’t move,” he says, distracted, a firm hand steadying her at the hip, and he drops bloodied pieces of glass into the bowl of the sink, staining the running water that pools a brackish brown. Relax, she doesn’t say. Fuck.  

“He was DEA, wasn’t he,” she says, staring down, her blood against the porcelain. 

Matt doesn’t say anything. His hand quickly covers the nape of her neck, heavy and hot, the way you might try and calm a wild animal. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why had she thought anything would be different this time? 

It’s the second op Kate has worked for him, it’s six months before the El Paso motel room (her blood, his hands), and they are standing alone in an airplane hangar.

“I’m not doing this again,” she tells him. She crosses her arms over his chest. 

A long, drawn-out sigh from Matt. He stops pacing to eye her. “Doing what exactly?” 

“What’s the op?” she asks him. “Why are we here? What are we doing?” 

He waves a hand. “Don’t worry about that.”

She braces her hands on her hips. She should know better: any actual information with him is hidden under a layer of grinning smarminess, like thick algae over deep water. 

“No. I told you. I’m not doing this again. Tell me. What is the op.” 

He licks his bottom lip before he smiles, hungry, like he’s just found the right place to feed. “Tell you. Issuing orders now, huh, Kate?” He looks at her like he’s in on a secret she had no idea she told him. And maybe he is. Maybe he knows that she’s only here because she’s that angry, that furious with him and with Alejandro. That they ruined the world she knew. That she still believes, that part of herself they have yet to find and reach, there has to be good that can come from any of this.

“Tell me,” she says again, more of a request than a demand.

“It’s funny. You’re funny. When I was … the fucking rookie on the play, I didn’t want to know shit. I liked being kept in the dark. No accountability. That was the goal. You did the job and the buck was passed up, over your head. A whole defensive shield when all you’ve gotta do is react.”

“I’m not you.”

“No. You’re not me.”

“Tell me.”

He watches her and she doesn’t yield, she holds his gaze, her ground. “Tell me,” she says again.

He steps towards her, too close. 

This is what he tells her:

Intel gathering. Conflict resolution. One more empty term.

Just because he tells her does not mean she believes it is the truth. See, Matt: she’s learning.

She shakes her head. “I see what you’re doing,” she says.

“Yeah? Go look over there then.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a bottle of cheap tequila on the table next to an opened box of band-aids.

“What now?” Kate asks. She sets her cup down, her body’s various aches dulled by a cocktail of the tequila and the expired pain pills she found in her duffle. 

“Your confidence in me, Kate – really, it’s moving.”

Matt has a butterfly bandage at his hairline; otherwise, he looks the same as he always does – untouched and unaffected.

That’s not entirely true; she’s noticing now. There’s still that low-level nervous energy to him, a tightness to him she can’t remember him ever having. For the past few hours, she has been telling herself this is little more than a botched mission. That this too can heal itself, that they’ll be fine. But another truth is this: she feels alone, stuck out on a ledge with a target on her back and any and every other bad metaphor that adds up to her hung out to dry. 

Because the thing is this: for all intents and legal purposes, Kate still works for the FBI. She no longer heads up the kidnap response team. Reggie took over the role in her stead, works side-by-side with a newer, greener agent, a neat haircut and a carriage to him that all but announces he just left the academy. Kate’s not even around the Phoenix office long enough to get the kid’s name. She works for Matt now and she knows enough about Matt not to trust him. Matt is not a man who offers protection but a man who takes and takes and then refashions his theft as unselfish, as the only practical path worth taking.

She remembers the feel of a gun held under her chin. She knows what it feels like when someone else forces your hand. 

That’s not going to happen this time.  

“You’re fucked,” Kate says, cold and hard.

“We,” Matt says carefully, “are fucked.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “There’s no we. There’s no us. It’s you. You're fucked, Matt.”

She’s practically spitting, she’s that mad, ten months of that stockpiled away. He watches her dispassionately, pours himself another drink, settles back in his chair.

“I seem to recall your name – Kate Macer – signing off on this. You’re up to your fucking eyeballs in this shit so you can’t be surprised at my surprise that somehow you don’t think you’re culpable.” 

“I was acting on your orders,” she says, voice too loud.

“Yeah?” He only raises his voice when she raises hers, like he has to match her, punch for punch, surpass her. “Look up the guys at Nuremberg. Ask them how that worked out for them. You won’t like the answer.”

Her hands are shaking again. She pushes her sweat-damp hair off her face, the only noise in the room the rattle of the air conditioning unit until he says, “I didn’t order you to kill him.”

“Fuck you,” she says. “What should I have done? Let him finish the job?”

Matt stands up, points a finger at her. 

“None of that was supposed to happen,” he snaps, tight and sinister. She doesn’t know how he manages it: he’s that much more intimidating when admitting he was wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You’d talk me out of doing something stupid, right,” Kate had said to Reggie. 

Somewhere along the line Kate lost Reggie.  

Reggie hadn’t looked at her the same after that first op. After it was her signature that tied it all up in a pretty red, white, and blue bow of permissible legal activity. Where she was concerned, his patience was frustrated and diminished.

“How stupid are we talking? If we’re talking you smoking? Yeah, man, I’m right there with you. I’ll talk you straight out of that shit, learn some hypnosis, need be.” 

“That’s not,” she started, stopped, shook her head, almost smiling.

“We talking dumber than that? We talking dangerous stupid?” He was joking; he had no idea how close to the truth he was. 

When Matt’s job offer had been on the table, before she accepted it, when she finally told Reggie the degree of dumb and danger she was considering, Reggie had told her he would never go back to that shit. Much like these men, these horsemen of the modern-day geopolitical apocalypse (his words), he labored under the noblest of intentions.

“Someone’s gotta look out for you. Sure as shit isn’t gonna be him.”

So righteous of him. She had said that, her lips around an unlit cigarette. 

“That’s not fair,” he told her, a minor accusation when the only crime committed was not understanding her the way she wanted to be felt and seen.

He had looked at her like he didn’t even want to know her anymore.

And, there. She wonders now if that’s what Matt had wanted in the first place: get her alone. Isolate his prey.

Because here she is – tired and alone. Now tell me: what is it you want me to do for you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was meant to be an intel op. In a small house across the border there was someone Matt wanted to talk to, so they went. Six hours before the motel, Kate was left alone to wait in the family room while Matt and Steve were led into the back of the house.

Nothing was supposed to happen.

This is what happens:

Kate is not alone. 

The man comes in through the kitchen, tall, plainly dressed. He freezes when he sees her. He eyes the vest, her boots, looks past her head out the window at the parked SUVs.

“American?” the man says, a note of surprise. No accent. 

Kate doesn’t say anything, trying to work out something in her head. He shouldn’t be here, that’s the lone thought in her head. He shouldn’t – it dawns on her that this is a trap, this whole thing, it has to be a trap.  

“You’re not with them,” she says, and just like that, a trap sprung, he’s moving for his gun. She pulls hers, faster. “Don’t.” She’s breathing hard, heart pounding. “Freeze. Move and I shoot. Move and I – ” Her hands are steady, steady even when the son of a bitch lunges for her. She pauses too long, long enough for him to get his hands on hers, aim the gun away, down, and she pulls the trigger, blows a hole through the floor and he knocks it from her grip, a swift knee to her gut and even doubled-over and gasping she slams her weight into him, the gun clattering across the room, head-butts him when he goes for his own gun, makes his hands clumsy, the gun falling out of easy reach, and it’d be funny, she thinks, a fistfight instead of a shootout, but he’s pulling a knife, so she snatches the one stowed in her boot, no finesse with her skill, all brutal, desperate desire to live. The fight can’t have lasted more than a couple minutes but it feels endless to her. She crashes into the glass coffee table, it shatters under their shared weight and she yelps, the pain sudden and distracting. She knocks his feet out from under him and rolls away, crawling across the floor, her hands bloody – the gun’s there, the gun, she can reach it, she can – and then he’s on her. 

When his hands go to her throat, she freezes. It’s so much like what happened before, with Ted; she can’t move, she’s terrified, his hands are squeezing around her throat and he is choking. Her legs kick out as she panics – did they leave her? did they all leave her? – her body twisting, and out of the corner of her eye she spies it: his knife. She blindly reaches out, can’t even think, can’t breathe, her fingers skim over the side of the blade, the flat of it, the pain secondary as she wraps her hand around it and then finally grips the hilt. She drives it first into his forearm – tries to open him up, his hands around her throat slackening – and then his throat. His blood is everywhere, her throat spasming as she tries to breathe. She shoves his body off of her, weakly kicking him away from her.

All she can hear at first is her pulse thudding in her ears, the whistling of her breath as she tries to inhale, and then – the heavy footfall of boots, the low murmur of male conversation. 

“You should not have brought her here.” She recognizes that voice and she feels panic rise in her again. She fights to drown out the adrenaline crowding her, she can’t stop shaking with anger, with futility. The knife is still clutched tacky with blood in her hand. She squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on breathing. 

“In my defense, she wasn’t supposed to kill anyone,” Matt says to Alejandro. Kate opens her eyes, lashes sticky with a dead man’s blood. She won’t let go of the knife. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Matt tells me you are working together again.” It was all Alejandro said. The cabin lights of the plane were dimmed, the two alone, this Kate’s third month on Matt’s team, the first time she was alone with Alejandro.

Kate eyed him carefully. “Yeah? What else he tell you?”

“What else should he be telling me?” Authority fit him as light and easy as the linen suit he wore.

“Nothing,” she finally said. “Nothing.” 

She looked across to Alejandro. “Should I trust him?” Alejandro’s face went pinched, as if in order to ask about the trustworthiness of another she was implying his own. 

“Matt – he is no man,” he said. “He is a ghost. A spook. You will pass right through him, or,” and he paused, “him through you.”

She bit down on an ironic grin. Matt had said something similar about him once. Kate had been called to testify before a congressional committee. They wanted to know about Fausto Alarcon. She flew out to DC alone and she only spoke to Matt about it before she left.

“They subpoenaed me,” she had said. 

“Congratulations,” he had said. “All grown up now.”

“It’s not funny. What am I – what am I supposed to tell them?”

“Tell the truth, don’t tell the truth.” He shrugged. “Nothing matters in that room. Procedure absent mandate. It’s a formality, Kate.”

She had doubted him, even then. 

“And Alejandro?” she asked. 

Matt had grinned, a mask. “There is no Alejandro. Remember that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I know you’re angry,” Matt starts to say, and Kate stops listening to him. 

Kate has her back against the wall of the motel room and Matt is standing over her (still talking, voice dragging and low, like if he talks like this it doesn’t matter what the words are). He’s not all that much taller than her but he seems giant to her now. She doesn’t like the way he’s looking at her – like she’s too stupid, too naive, to understand any of this. Too inconsequential. 

Something in her snaps.

Kate grabs his hand – a small burst of pride at catching him off guard – and she drags his hand up to her bruised throat. These are the consequences. Her throat is tender, the knuckles on his right hand bleeding through the bandage he hastily applied. It’s the only real sign on him that’s he’s not only been a witness but a perpetrator of violence. She thinks he should be marked more; she swallows. 

She can feel him resisting her, the arm connected to his hand stiff and unyielding, so she tips her head back, bares more of her throat to him, makes him see, witness, the already purpling bruises, imprints of a dead man’s fingertips. She pulls at his wrist harder, his fingers barely touching her. He meets her eye, and that easy nonchalance he wears so naturally, an armor all its own, is absent now. His eyes are dark, face lined and unfamiliar, more in his element than she has ever seen him as he obeys her. It doesn’t feel like obedience though, she thinks. Even with the reluctance still there between them it feels like this was all him, that of the two of them, he is the only one capable of harm. His hand spreads to cover the width of her throat, fingers curling, no pressure exerted, not yet.

A noisy exhale escapes him and she swallows again. He must feel that beneath his hand. Her own hand is still gripping his wrist, but his fingers move of their own volition, pressing lightly into the bruises left behind, testing her. Kate’s mouth parts open but she does not make a sound. It’s not enough. If she has to remember a hand clutched around her throat, she wants to picture him. She wants to blame Matt. She squeezes his wrist, pulls on his arm again, towards her. 

“Why are you – ” he starts to ask the question, quiet and genuinely curious, but he leaves it unfinished.

“Shut up,” she says anyway. “Shut up,” breathy, eager as she can feel the incremental tightening of his grip. 

She watches him under half-lidded eyes. She thinks she is just as mad at herself as she is at him; it’s easier to be mad at him. 

Matt squeezes once, hard, experimental, and her eyes tear. A gasp escapes her as a bolt travels straight through her, settles hot and low in her gut. His eyes pin her, any question from before gone, replaced by an equally dark understanding.

Kate can feel the heat of him, so close to her, even though the only part of him touching her is his hand at her throat and her hand on his wrist. His grip is ruthless around her now, tight enough to make the old pain ache, cruel enough to inspire new. Kate is openly panting for breath, his eyes keep flicking from her eyes to her open mouth, back again. He squeezes every now and again, as if she is a curiosity he can toy with at will, cuts off her breath, a reminder – his power, his acquiescence to what she wants.

The low sound he makes when he moves closer to her vibrates through him to her. His hand closes tighter, too tight, around her throat. Without thinking, she grabs him by the front of his shirt, can feel his chest beneath her curled hand. He loosens his own grip, the whole length of him pressed against her, both of them breathing hard, his hand running from the cut of her jaw down her neck to her collarbone, spreading, and she shivers. His free hand flexes alongside her hip but doesn’t touch her.

And then, his eyes locked on hers, his hand closes tight around her, too tight, and she is choking – an abrupt break into violence. She can hear herself wheezing, her shoulders rattling against the wall as she tries to push against him, push him off, adrenaline pumping through her. His face takes up her entire frame of vision, terror racing through her as her vision begins to blur along the edges. He’ll kill her, she thinks. He could kills her. But, no, no – she struggles for breath – she has to ruin him first, she has to, he has to – 

He lets go of her just as unexpectedly. Kate slumps, both against him and the wall, he’s so close now, he’s everywhere. His shirt is still clutched in her grasp and her head lolls forward into his shoulder as she trembles, gasps, coughs for breath, her throat burning, chest aching. Matt doesn’t do anything. He stands there, solid and unmovable. She can feel the pounding of his own heart, the unsteadiness to his breath. 

When Kate pulls back from him, he attempts his usual wolfish grin. It falters, enough for her to catch it. His face is that impossible map of lines and shadows she’s never been able to read. His eyes are bright; hers drift down to his mouth.

Kate kisses him. Forceful, her mouth crashes into his, unsurprising that he kisses back. Kissing him, she thinks, is the opposite of romance. Like when you shock a pool with chlorine – a sudden dose of poison meant to kill the disease one thinks they see in the other. She bites his bottom lip too hard and Matt slams her head back into the wall. Her gasp is loud, mouth parted open for him. He has a hand knotted in her hair, holding her head back, and it hurts, it _hurts_ , and the noise she makes sounds like the start of a laugh, like something dark and unending opening inside her.

Matt pulls back first, smug and something she will not name. He shamelessly adjusts himself as he steps back from her, visibly hard. She thinks she should feel more shame. She thinks that’s not the worst part of all this, not by a long shot. 

He takes a seat at the small table, a long pull from his cup of cheap tequila.

“Got what you wanted?” he asks her. She meets his eye and she can see it there: a dare.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She kissed Alejandro, once. 

It was awhile back. She blamed it on a lot of things, most of all how unmoored and alone she had felt. How out of anyone in her life she assumed he would be the one to best understand her, the disappointment when he chose not to. Her mouth pressed to his and there was no response. He was impassive, unyielding. She wasn’t sure how she could’ve expected less. 

For a man who had held a gun to her head, he was impossibly careful with her, his fingertips light against her arms as he pushed her away from him. A bitter laugh fled her mouth. “You’re better than this,” he had said, and that only made her laugh harder. 

The one time Reggie kissed her, he kissed her as if he was asking her for permission he knew she would not grant him. He was right; the office Christmas party, too much egg nog, she had known him for six months, and she denied him. They never talked about it again.

She can’t remember the woman who used to kiss her husband. She can’t imagine what that felt like.  

When she kisses Matt, when he kisses her, he kisses her like a demand. Like an act that should be called anything other than a kiss. A command. Come. Heel. Obey. He opens his mouth and she opens hers. 

Surprise me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is very little she knows about Matt. 

“You married?” she had asked him. They were riding together in the same SUV, the sun setting, and he had made some glib remark about no one getting home in time for dinner. It had hit her then that she had no idea what home constituted for him.  

He had laughed, a bitter bark.

“Divorced?” she tried. 

He held up two fingers and mouthed the word, _twice_.

Kate looked into him not long after that. The tiny bits of information, the dribs and drabs, she learned about him didn’t add up to much. He served in Desert Storm. In what capacity was unclear, but he was there, his military record redacted and above her pay grade. He lived in DC for awhile, circa 9/11, the places he was stationed in the immediate aftermath a thick black inked-out line, same for his employer, leaving it up to her imagination and an atlas.

It was unclear when or why he came out to the border, when and why and how he earned himself the position he enjoys now. Where he lives. She had wondered if Matt Graver was even his real name, but, no, it was. She found a photo of him graduating from Princeton University, class of 1991. He was so much younger in the photo, but the smile was the same and unquestionably his: toothy and shit-eating, just far enough right of center to be called threatening instead of charming.  

Another time, mid-flight, he had yanked off a sweat-stained Cleveland Indians t-shirt and swapped it for a Miami Dolphins one. It was then she saw it: an old bullet wound, pocked and scarred on his abdomen. 

“Where’s that from?” she had asked, eyes bright and clear as she looked up to him.

“Oh that?” He looked down, pulled the t-shirt over his shoulders, tone too relaxed. She was learning. She was teaching herself how to pick through his bullshit. He was very good but she was learning. 

“Yeah that,” she said.

“I got shot,” he said, but he said it funny, like it was something funny and after all this time and all this healing still a kind of surprise to him. “Crazy what a bullet will do when it rips through human flesh.”

“That’s not,” she started and then she stopped. What was the point. What was the goddamn point with him.

It became a kind of game after that. He told her all sorts of fake stories about where that scar came from. Kate believed him the first time – insurgents in Beirut – but then quickly realized he was lying. She watched his mouth slice his face in half as he laughed at her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the motel, Kate steps over to the table. She takes a slug out of the cheap tequila and winces. 

She’s not drunk, but she does think she’s lost focus.

She stands between his spread legs, Matt seated at the table. 

He looks up at her; she can’t read his face. 

“I want you to fuck me,” she says, careful and low. He gives nothing away but a quick tic at the corner of his jaw. His hand flexes into a fist against his thigh; she can still feel it around her throat.

“Get on the bed,” he says but he doesn’t move.

Her heart pounds, and she obeys, perched on the edge of the bed. 

He tells her to take her pants off and she does, kicking them down her legs. She’s wet for him already, over only this. A flush of shame tied to that, a heat that bleeds into anger and anger is easy and navigable where he is concerned; she clings to that. 

He – still seated, arms crossed over his chest, watching her –tells her to take her shirt off.

“No,” she says, reclining back on her elbows on the bed. “You do it.” She is only wearing her cotton panties and an old t-shirt. There’s a bruise on her hip, another along her ribcage, her shoulder and her shoulder blade still aching. 

Kate watches the slow way he rises, steps to her. She swallows, her breath coming fast. He pushes her to lay flat, draws her hands over her head, her arms extended, her injuries pulling and aching in protest. She tips her head back and doesn’t watch him, obeys with her hands over her head, doesn’t move them.

Matt lifts the hem of her shirt; she can barely feel his hands on her as they push against her, the shirt going up with him. She makes a cut-off sound in the back of her throat when his hand finds the bruise along her ribs, her fingers curling over her head, back arching, hips lifting. Matt stills. She can feel the heat of his hands on her now, her shirt rolled up to just under her bra. She’s breathing hard, throat still sore, and she can hear him breathing too, fast and unsteady. The mattress dips as he places his knees either side of her body.

Kate rolls her neck, a twinge pulling through her, grounding her, and she looks down her body at him. She finds him looking up at her. She can picture him in an interrogation room. She doesn’t need imagination for that, she has been witness to it, to him with his questions and his taunting and the way he doesn’t even blink, not at all, not even when the begging starts or the blood or the way she has learned that other human beings whine when they are pushed beyond their limit. With his eyes boring into hers, he presses the flat of his hand into the bruise and she moans, loud, squirms under him. He drags her shirt up and over her breasts, his hands grazing the sides of them, and yanks it over her head.

His body moves over hers and it’s not embarrassing if both of them panting. The smell of him is hot and familiar, the desert, male, unquantifiable. Kate makes to move her arms – her shoulders have gone stiff, a trembling traveling down to her wrists, her fingers – but Matt’s faster. His hand covers the expanse of both her wrists, knotting them up tight, her bones grinding under his grip. She bites down on a tight sound; he offers a minor shake of his head, the lift of an eyebrow. 

The bruises on her throat are more visible now and with his free hand he pushes her chin up, drags his fingers down from her jaw to the hollow of her throat, presses his thumb right there into it and Kate swallows hard. His hand travels lower, palms her breast, nipple hard under his hand. His eyes are still on her face when he slips his hand under the thin fabric of her bra, skin on skin, his hand hot as it covers her. Her legs spread wider, her hip sore under his weight, can feel him hard against her thigh. 

His mouth finally on her is a relief but it’s not her mouth. It’s the hinge of her jaw, Matt biting and sucking, and then under, down her throat, leaving a trail of his cooling spit on her skin. She bites the inside of her lower lip to stay quiet. She bites too hard, can taste blood. She thinks: if he kisses me, he’ll taste blood. She clenches low in her gut, the thought leaving her that much wetter between her legs, that much more disgusted with herself. His mouth travels lower, until he’s sucking a nipple through her bra. She tries to move her arms, but his grip around her wrists doesn’t lessen and he pushes them down into the mattress, the pain in her shoulder distracting, heightening, as she feels the cool air hit the wet material over her breast. He yanks the fabric aside and his mouth is on her bare breast now and she can’t stop first the gasp and then the groan that leaves her mouth.

It’s almost like he rewards her for that – his free hand moves lower on her body, the heel of his hand presses between her legs. He has to feel how wet the cotton is, he must, because he bites at her throat – she thinks _wolf_ , not for the first time – to silence the soft groan that leaves him. He presses his hand firmer against her cunt, thumb rubbing at where he thinks her clit might be under her panties. He misses, but Kate still stammers out a dazed, “Fuck,” all the same, pushing her hips into him, chasing his hand. 

“Let me,” she gasps, trying to lift her arms. He moves his hand from between her legs, grips her hip, as he slots his hips against hers, grinding down. “Let me,” she says again, not entirely sure what she is asking permission for other than to move. 

He relents, releases her wrists and her arms feel stiff. Her hands drip to his shoulders, push at his shirt, fingers clawing at the opened collar instead of the buttons until he takes the hint, rears back from her and out of her grasp. Kate watches him with big, glassy eyes. “Take that off,” he says, nodding at her tits as he removes his shirt. He throws his shirt off the bed, eyes fixed on bared breasts, a bite mark reddening along the curve of the right one. He swipes the pad of his thumb over it. His eyes lift back to her face, watching her, when he hooks his thumbs under the elastic of her panties, drags them down her legs. He still has his pants on when he spreads her for him, settles himself between her legs.

It’s unclear who kisses who, more of a crash, a collision, rough and messy and wet, his hand knotted in her hair. She struggles naked under him, gets his pants off of him, cock hot against her thigh, pants still around his knees. 

She bites at his mouth and he pulls her hair. “This is what you wanted,” he tells her, his teeth cracking against hers, guides her hand to his cock. And she’s furious, anger flushing hot over her, mixes with the lust already thrumming through her. She thinks that makes her dangerous. She thinks he doesn’t get to tell her that, he doesn’t get to tell her what she wants. He doesn’t get to know. 

She takes him in hand, tips her head back. “Shut the fuck up,” she says. That only makes him chuckle, his mouth lowering to hers but she stops him, her other hand grabbing him by the jaw.

With her hand at the center of his chest, she pushes him off her and he lets her. He lays back, eyes hooded, watching her carefully.

Where is it? she wants to ask him. Where is the release? Kate keeps her hand on his chest, holds him down, as she spreads her legs. When is the moment she can make sense of any of this. All of this. When does she get to justify what she has done and what she continues to do?

She climbs on top of him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A month ago, she ran into her ex-husband at the grocery store. He was the only one who called her “Katie.” He had looked at her like he had just seen someone brought back from the dead. It left her self-conscious, aware of her messy hair, the messy ponytail, the sunburn along her collarbone and nose and cheeks. How she had gotten harder and thinner looking since she saw him last. The way he said her name told her this is what he seeing.

“How are you doing?” he asked her, but he asked it too gentle and that right there was always the problem. Gentleness. She was angry at him like this was something new and not the same old stale wound hardened into scar tissue. 

“I’m great.” 

“Heard you got a promotion of some sorts.”

“Of some sorts.” She wondered who told him. She put her hand on her hip, saw the way he eyed her arm, the tight muscle, the bony pop of her shoulder and immediately relaxed.

“You seeing anyone these days?” Kate arched an eyebrow. She knew the only reason he asked the question was to absolve himself of whatever guilt he felt for shacking up with that temp from his office so soon after they separated. She wondered if they were still shacked up. She wondered if he was going to marry that girl. She looked at him and thought he could never belong to her now nor her to him. 

“Nope, still single.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Not what you meant?” Oh, fuck him. “You mean a therapist? A doctor? No, no, I’m not seeing one of those either, thanks.”

And she knew. She knew what she looked like. She knew her eyes were now too big for her face and that they betrayed her at every turn. They said: I’ve seen some shit. They said: there’s no coming back from that. 

“Katie,” he said, and that was it.

“It was great to see you,” she said sharply. She thought she was smiling but her mouth felt too unsteady.

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m not doing anything at all.” Her mouth widened, bared her teeth. “See you around.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You don’t come until I say you do,” she says. Her voice isn’t as steely as she’d like it to be – too raspy, broken.

Beneath her, Matt laughs, relaxes, settles in, shifts his hips as she lazily pumps his cock.. “Yes, Ma’am.” It takes a certain degree of arrogance to mock the person who has your dick in their hand, she thinks. She twists her wrist, likes the way his grin goes unfocused, how his body tenses. 

“Shut the fuck up,” she repeats. He grins wider. 

Kate meets his eye. She wants that smile to come crashing down, so she makes it. She slaps him hard across the face with her free hand. His head whips to the side; his cock twitches in her hand. He laughs again, but this time the sound is mean, threatening. His eyes, pupils blown, find hers and the challenge is there. So she does it again, again, notices that his hips are pushing up against her, his cock leaking over her hand. He likes it when she hurts him. Spite fills her. She punches him this time and he moans, spits the word, “ _fuck_ ,” along with some blood down his chin and she freezes. 

“Shit,” she whispers, bites back an apology she’s not entirely sure she’d mean. 

Leaning over, she cups his face in her hands, her hair falling loose and over the both of them as she bends into him, the entire length of him pulsing with heat and adrenaline under her. She’s soaked – Matt plaint and wanting, Matt under her, is too much. His teeth are red with his blood, a small cut on his bottom lip where her fist made his teeth break flesh. He says her name, so she kisses him, tastes him, wonders what happened to her, who she is, who this woman is and why she has her name. He kisses back, biting at her mouth like he wants to make her bleed too. Of course he does. The only thing he knows how to do is settle a score. She rears back suddenly and slaps him again, lighter this time, as close to affection as she can allow, and his eyes flicker shut. 

There must be something wrong with her, this is what she thinks. This is what she thinks as she slides down onto him. He sighs in what sounds like relief, his head tipped back, throat bared to her and she watches it shift as he swallows, the bob of his adam’s apple, the dip of his throat, the thrumming pulse visible under thin skin, taut cords pulled tight as he tries to keep himself under control. Anatomy fascinates her now; so many obvious human weaknesses, so easy to exploit. 

She rides him, hard. She tells him not to come, keeps saying it, easier than telling him anything else. She grinds down harder, can’t stand him watching her like this – like he _knows her_ – so she covers his face with her hand. Hot wet tongue against the palm of her hand, like he’s been waiting for this, needs to taste her, and she shivers.  

The heel of her hand presses harder under his jaw, shoving his face into the pillow. He moans when she does that, a genuine reaction. The only time she can get anything real out of him is by force, by fucking him.

Her own breath catches, his moaning muffled, his blunt fingernails digging into her thighs, and she comes, almost as if it’s out of nowhere, a punch to the gut that leaves her gasping and weak.

He rolls them – she can’t help but think her time is up, his patience expired, time for a real show of dominance, but she’s wrong, she’s wrong, she’s so wrong – and fucks into her roughly, Kate still sensitive from her orgasm, and she makes a sound like a whimper. His hips snap, and the most bizarre part of all is how he keeps begging her – “let me come, tell me come, let me,” – along her jaw. Blood from his lip smears along her throat, up, her jaw, that coppery stench between them, on their shared breath; she bites back his name as her nails score his back.

He still hasn’t come but his control is slipping (always about control with him), their mouths knocking together, a cage fight instead of a kiss, the sound of him fucking her wet and messy, sloppy, and fuck, she wants to come again. 

His hips start to move erratically, his face buried in her neck. She clenches around him and he groans a mix of profanity and her name. 

“Look at me,” she says, the words tight and mean. His hips stutter into her, his grip on her tight and bruising, but he does. She can feel the cords of his neck strain under her hand when she grabs him by the throat. She squeezes – around his throat, around his cock –and, “Come,” she manages to gasp, “I want you to come.”  

She feels him, breathless, control ceded, curiously silent as he obeys her. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room is dark, the lit tip of Kate’s cigarette the lone source of light. She inhales. Her body aches from his use, from the abuse she treated it to before him.

The way Matt is looking at her is more intimate, more invasive, than anything he has just done to her body.

“What?” The hard edge to her voice smoothed over; the question comes out too soft and she hates that, hates herself. She wants to be someone else; fears she already is. She takes another drag of the cigarette, feels his fingers cross over hers when he takes it from her. For the first time since she’s met him, he doesn’t have anything to say. 

“I wish I had never met you,” she says quietly to the ceiling. She glances at him quickly to find him watching her, his face blank.

“Yeah?” he says. He stubs the cigarette out. “I’m real sorry about that,” he says after a pause.

“No. You’re not.” She says it mournful and resigned, her voice threatening to break. She wants her cigarette back. 

“No. I’m not.” 

She looks at him. Without meaning to, her fingers brush over the scar, sheets low over his hips.

“It was you,” he says to her, dark and forbidding and maybe even earnest. “You traveled back in time. This is in the future of course, time travel having been perfected. But you came back. You found me. Told me you had the single goal in mind to shoot me and then you did.”

The sheets shift and she doesn’t say anything. He rolls towards her. “Don’t you remember?” he asks, low and thick. She can feel his mouth, hot at her shoulder. “Don’t you remember? You wanted to make me pay.” He grabs her hip, pulls her to him and she yields.

“Don’t you want to hurt me?” 

“Fuck you,” she whispers, but she is already winding her leg around him. She is already digging her nails into his shoulder, opening and closing herself around him like a fist. “Fuck you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matt clears out in the morning. “Looks like I’m out of a job,” he jokes, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Looks like you are, too.”

The task force will be disbanded – for good this time, the money dried up, the tide turning in DC and no one with a campaign manager and PAC for a war chest will want to answer for their array of sins. 

“You’re gonna hang this on me,” Kate says, not really a question. He has the decency to look sheepish before he hides that behind a wide grin. 

“Don’t look so surprised,” he says. “You knew who you were getting in bed with.” 

The car crashed. The wrong man found her. She quit keeping track of the damage, the collateral.

“I don’t know you at all.” 

Any other man, and that tell would have been more obvious. Any other man. She can still spy it in him, the brief tightening of his jaw, that small hint of disappointment buried beneath the bravado.

“You know enough.”

“I want a promotion,” she says. She stands up straighter. “And I want to have to never see you again.”

His smile shifts, an incredulous slant to his face. “Kate.”

If she’s learned anything from him it’s how to work a person against themselves. 

“I know everything. What about any of this made you think you earned my trust. My loyalty.”

His mouth tips up; she thinks it looks a lot like pride. Matt nods. “We’ll talk.”

_Or I will_ , she doesn’t say. She doesn’t need to say it.

She watches him zip his bag, haul the strap over his shoulder.

“Why me?” she asks. 

He dismisses the question. “Why not you.” 

“No,” she says. Her hands are chapped and reddened and the knuckles on her right hand form a swollen, aching ridge. Her reflection is behind his head in the mirror but she doesn’t look. It’s not that she can’t recognize herself anymore but the opposite: she knows her face. She knows the tired lines around her eyes, the dark circles, the tight, cynical bent to her mouth that wasn’t there a year ago, a month. She can look herself in the eye, still, even now, and that might be most unsettling part of all. 

Matt looks at her and she looks back and she lied when she said she didn’t know him, she thinks – she fears – she knows him too well. He reaches, his hand on her upper arm, a quick squeeze, and then he’s moving away from her. 

“You did good work,” he says.

Matt leaves. She is alone, with herself, with that face in the mirror. Looks just like her.

She considers that reflection, as if there are these two halves of herself she’s never going to reconcile _._ Her face is battered, bruises in a ring around her neck, her mouth swollen. That hungry glint in her eye; it looks familiar. 

Relax, she thinks. The body heals itself. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That first op, after the crash, after he found her, Matt told her to stay in the car. “Keep the engine running,” he had joked. “Keep your eyes open,” and he slapped the roof of the car with his hand twice and then was off, into the warehouse waiting in front of them. Kate wasn’t alone. Beside her sat a girl, an informant she assumed, afraid she was incorrect.

Kate watched the dark building, distracted. She realized in that moment that lately this was what she was always doing: waiting. Waiting for something to happen to her. It hadn’t occurred to her that was what she had been doing ever since Alejandro had left her apartment with her signature: she was waiting for the next thing to happen to her. And then Matt re-entered her life, and here she was again: waiting. She’d always be waiting, she thought, unless, until, she became the one who made things happen. 

She caught the corner of her own eye in the rearview mirror and quickly looked away. She sighed heavily.

“What the hell am I doing here?” she said.

“ _¿Qué?_ ” the girl said. 

“Keep your eyes open,” Matt had said.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
